Great Olympic Moments: Dick Fosbury debuts his flop at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics

No single performance at an Olympic Games has, in the past 50 years, had such
a revolutionising effect on an athletics discipline as Dick Fosbury’s
opening leap in the men’s high jump at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

It was the international debut of what became known as the Fosbury flop. High jumpers had tried it before but Fosbury was the first to perfect going over the bar head-first and backwards. It looked dangerous and ungainly to the purists but it won the American the gold medal – with an Olympic record height of 2.24 metres (7ft 4 1/4ins) – ahead of his teammate Ed Caruthers, who cleared 2.22m (7ft 3 1/4ins), using a more conventional method.

Before Fosbury, most elite jumpers used techniques such as the straddle or western roll, clearing the bar on their sides or face down. Nothing more adventurous was possible because of the unforgiving landing surfaces, sandpits or low piles of matting. The introduction of big foam pillows opened up the possibility of trying something radically different.

Debbie Brill of Canada and the American Bruce Quande were among those who had experimented with something similar to the Fosbury flop in the early Sixties.

Fosbury, 21 at the time of the 1968 Games, was studying civil engineering at Oregon State University in Corvallis and it was widely assumed he had used scientific thinking to refine his jumping style. Not a bit of it. "It was all by instinct," he said many years later. "It happened one day at a competition. My mind was driving my body to work out the best way to get over the bar."

The first press photographs of Fosbury using his technique were greeted with scepticism, even ridicule. One newspaper picked up the image of him "lying down" as he went over the bar to describe him as "the world’s laziest high jumper". Attitudes changed when he won the 1968 NCAA title and went on to finish first in the US Olympic Trials.

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In the Olympic final, three jumpers cleared 2.20m (7ft 2 1/2ins) – and Fosbury was the only one of the trio to have succeeded at every height on his first attempt. At 2.22m, Fosbury again cleared the bar on his first jump. Caruthers went over on his second effort, while Valentin Gavrilov of the Soviet Union missed on all three attempts. The bar was raised to 2.24 meters, an Olympic and US record. Fosbury missed twice, but cleared the third time; Caruthers dislodged the bar each time.